Are you maximizing the legal performance-enhancing drug that will take your life to the next level?
IoNTELLIGENCE is the Playbook for Professional Success, Personal Transformation, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
- 🚨 The Big Idea: Sleep is the most important measure you can undertake to improve every aspect of your work and life.
- 🔧 What To Do Next: Get. More. Sleep. Tonight.
- 🔬 Go Deeper: Read and listen to Dr. Matthew Walker.
📖 Reading Time: 7 Minutes
What if I told you that embracing one change in your life could make you happier, give you more energy, make you look younger, feel smarter, succeed more at work, and live longer? What if I added that it was accessible tonight and absolutely free? Could I interest you in that product?
Everything I just wrote is accurate, and the miracle drug I’m offering you is a good night’s sleep.
Here’s the truth: if the pharmaceutical industry invented a pill that did for us what sleep does, it would be worth trillions. How do I know that? Because the market for products that help us sleep just a bit better is worth $40 billion. Lucky for us, sleep was provided to us by Evolution — which is one crucial proof of its incredible value. Darwinian selection would have washed it out of our behavior 200,000 years ago if sleep was unimportant to our health, vitality, and happiness.
Now I know what you’re thinking: sleep is nice and all, but it can and sometimes should be sacrificed to do everything you want. Wrong. Not only does regular, proper sleep help you thrive, but it’s as fundamental to our survival as oxygen, food, and water.
Let me make three bold claims:
Sleep is a performance-enhancing drug.
Sleep should be considered part of your work.
Sleep is the most critical action you should be taking to improve every aspect of your life.
🚨 The Big Idea
There’s a reason why my favorite fictional spy, Jason Bourne, says that “sleep is a weapon.” He’s not alone in preaching the power of restoration. Everyone from NBA athletes and Navy SEALs to business titans like Jeff Bezos credits a good night’s rest as a critical component of peak performance. Let’s investigate why sleep is so important.
Sleep Deprivation By the Numbers
- 6.2 hours: The average amount of sleep the typical American gets a night. That’s probably you.
- 3 to 5%: the percentage of the population that can function well with less than 6 hours of sleep due to a rare gene mutation. Chances are, that’s not you.
- 12%: the increase in the likelihood of premature death for people who regularly get less than 7 hours of sleep a night. That’s the risk you’re running from not getting enough shuteye on a regular basis.
- 0.05%: The blood alcohol equivalent of the impact of the average American’s sleep debt. In other words, you’re operating as if you’ve had three beers or cocktails in two hours — just under the legal limit of 0.08% in California, for example.
- 55% and 89%: The increase in the likelihood of obesity in adults and children who get 6 hours of sleep or less a night.
- 10 years: The amount of years that sleep deprivation ages you in a critical area of energy and vitality. A man who consistently gets between 5 and 7 hours of sleep has lower testosterone levels than his peers and has numbers consistent with someone ten years older than him.
The Power of Sleep: Your Ultimate Life and Performance Enhancer
- Sleep helps you lose weight. Getting enough sleep suppresses the release of the hormone ghrelin, which your body secretes to stimulate your appetite. Sleep deprivation causes weight gain. This is why a late night out increases hunger and pushes you to eat calorie-dense, high-carb foods and sweets.
- Sleep makes you better at your job — whatever you do. Professor Anders Ericsson authored the famous study discussing how experts needed 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become skilled at their craft. This is the talking point you probably read in Malcolm Gladwell’s book. However, the less well-known but more relevant factor Ericsson discovered was that the best performers slept more than their peers (8 hours and 36 minutes, on average). In other words, he found a direct link between more rest and greater achievement.
- Sleep well; Think well. This was true of the violinists Ericsson examined, but it holds just as true for knowledge workers like us. While your body is resting, your brain is not: it’s the period it uses to shift memories from short-term to long-term, remove cognitive trash, and make clever associations between disparate parts of your waking experience. In other words, it runs an optimization program on your operating system every night. Thanks to these processes, you remember more, think more clearly, and are more creative after a good night’s night’s rest.
“If you sleep less, you eat more. You remember less. You get sick more often. You look bad. And poor sleep also leads to high blood pressure, missed workouts, irritability, poor decision-making, and greatly impaired well-being.” (Tom Rath in “Eat Move Sleep”)
But other than that, sleeping less than 7 to 8 hours a night is fine!
🔧 What To Do Next
I hope the stat pack above has convinced you of the importance of prioritizing sleep. If you’re persuaded but have struggled with sleep in the past, try these tips and tricks.
Prioritize sleep the way you work — it’s the easiest way to improve your job performance overnight (pun intended).
Sleep is part of your work. As our jobs become increasingly cognitive, we need to treat and train our minds like muscles. Reframe rest and self-care not as something you do separately from your job but as an integral part of it.
Is an Olympic athlete’s only responsibility to win medals? No. Training to put themselves in a position to win gold is a huge part of their work and is inseparable from their performance.
Your day job is like an intellectual Olympics. So, your training — the preparation — has to become a more prominent part of the overall equation. We are all “cognitive athletes” now.
Give yourself an adequate “sleep opportunity” every night …
That’s the technical term for the time spent in bed attempting to sleep. Thanks to my Apple Watch, I know I toss and turn for about one hour every night. I need to give myself 8.5 hours of sleep to have a shot at my optimal sleep amount — around 7.5 hours.
… by practicing good “sleep hygiene.”
These are the elements of a home and bedroom environment that will enable sound sleep:
- Dark Room: the darker, the better. Blackout curtains and sleep masks can be crucial in this regard.
- Cold Room: Sleep experts consider that a temperature of 66 degrees Fahrenheit (19 Celsius) is optimal. If you’ve ever noticed that falling asleep on a sweltering summer night is incredibly hard, this is why. Your body’s temperature has to drop for it to release melatonin, the sleep-promoting hormone.
- Have a Standard Bedtime: Try to sleep at the same time every night, regardless of whether it’s a weeknight or weekend. This is strategic from a neurological perspective: By going to bed at irregular times, you decrease the amount of slow-wave sleep crucial to detoxing your brain of damaged cells and suppress the growth hormones critical to muscle recovery. Just like babies and puppies, we thrive when the brain and body enjoy a consistent rhythm — especially when it comes to rest.
Be active to build up “sleep pressure” — ideally not within two or three hours of bedtime.
A 2010 Brazilian study found that moderate aerobic exercise increased reported sleep time by 26% percent among chronic insomniacs but can hinder it if undertaken too late in the day.
When sleep-deprived on a given day, try my recipe for a “napuccino.”
A power nap is a ninja move. Don’t just take my word for it: take NASA’s. It found a twenty-five-minute nap improved judgment by 35 percent and vigilance by 16 percent.
Another study found that 15- to 20-minute naps led to more alertness and better performance than drinking a cup of coffee. Do you know what’s better than that? Doing both. That’s why I have a napuccino every day.
Whenever possible, I have a caffeinated beverage (a homemade iced mocha) followed immediately by a 12 to 20-minute nap. It takes that amount of time for the caffeine to hit your bloodstream, and a 15-minute nap is optimal for a short, maximally efficient restorative snooze. As you probably know, we go through 4 different phases when we sleep, and the first one ends about 15 minutes in. If you take a longer one, you will likely have that “jet lag” feeling of sleeping but not waking up rested. So, the rule of thumb for naps is under 20 or 90 minutes (the typical 4-stage sleep cycle).
The combination of the nap and caffeine is a fantastic brain and body reset. The optimal time to sneak one in is 6 to 8 hours after you are up that morning when we hit the “post-prandial dip” of energy. Ever feel lethargic after lunch? It’s not the pasta you ate, but your body’s natural slow-down at mid-point during the day. This is why the peak hour for people doing coffee runs at the local barista is 2:22 pm — roughly 7.5 hours after most people wake up.
🔬 Go Deeper & Get Smart Fast
- If you have a few hours, 👓 “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker. It’s no overstatement to say that this book changed my life. It’s the single best long-form argument for the paramount importance of sleep, and reading it inspired me to make rest a top priority in my day and life.
- If you have under 1 hour, 🎧 to this NPR podcast interview with Dr. Walker. It’s not as good as reading the book, but it will persuade you that it’s not cool to be sleep-deprived.
- If you have under 10 minutes, 👓 this article on “Sleep Hygiene.”
